The focus of this lesson is zu
Sie helfen ihm, sein Englisch zu verbessern.
"You help him to improve his English."

A lot of times when English uses the infinitive in a sentence, German uses the preposition „zu“. For example:
1. Wir haben nicht viel Zeit, Deutsch zu üben. - We don't have much time to practise German.
2. Ich habe keine Lust, nach Hause zu gehen. - I am not in the mood to go home.

The rule for these cases is to place the „zu“ immediately in front of the verb. This means that when you have two verbs piled up at the end of your subclause, the „zu“ is placed in the middle: „schlafen zu gehen“ (to go to sleep). And when you have a splitting verb, the „zu“ is inserted between the prefix and the verb stem! For example: „mitzukommen“ (to come along), „abzugeben" (to hand (sth.) over), „wegzugehen“ (to go away) and so on.

„zu“ is essential when making a subclause with „um“. „um“ always requires a „zu“ somewhere later in the phrase. Here are some examples of such phrases;

Ich komme nach Deutschland, um Deutsch zu lernen. = I come to Germany in order to learn German.
Es ist zu kalt, um rauszugehen. = It is too cold to go out.

1. dazu = in addition to that; about that. „Ich lerne viel dazu“ (I learn much new stuff). „Dazu kann ich nichts sagen“ (I can't say anything about that).
2. Dann korrigiert mich niemand. = Then nobody corrects me. (unusual word order)
3. im Lehrbuch stehen = to 'stand' in the textbook = to be written in the textbook.
4. I'm not sure if you noticed, but we saw both „Sprach-“ and „Sprachen-“ as a prefix in this lesson. This is one of the annoying things about German compound nouns – there is no good reason for it to be „Sprachtandem“ but „Sprachenaustausch“?

Practising German wherever you are

If you aren't in Germany, that is no excuse not to practise German. Here are some things you can do.

1. Get a language exchange partner. If you are in a major city or in a university town, there are bound to be some Germans, Austrians or Swiss people that you could practise with.
2. Go to German language meet-ups. This is where German expats as well as German language enthusiasts get together to speak German and exchange stories.
3. Surf the German internet. You can use a browser plugin to automatically give you translations whenever you hover over an unknown word, so you don't need to keep a
dictionary open. At the beginning, German blogs are a good choice. If you follow the news closely, German news sites might also interest you, because you'll be able to understand a lot from context. Deutsche Welle offers news in particularly simple German. They also have slow news podcasts.
4. Watch some German movies with subtitles. Having German subtitles will really increase the amount of learning you get out of a movie. You could also watch German TV. If there is none locally, look online, various German TV stations offer at least some of their program online.
5. Get some German books from the library or from an online bookstore. Stay away from the classics, those are hard even for Germans. The easiest are bilingual books, that is books that have German and English side-by-side, or books that you have already read in English.

Do you have more suggestions? Let us know in the comments.